Spank you very much, Ramsey.
Reprint of Campbell’s 1987 Scared Stiff: Tales of Seduction and Terror (1987) that keeps the Clive Barker introduction and has three new stories and an afterword by Campbell (Pact of the Fathers, 2001, etc.). The original illustrations are gone.
With plenty of meat about his start as a writer, Campbell’s afterword gives the background about the seven earlier stories here—which, back in the late ’60s and ’70s, were meant to be groundbreaking works in the horror genre. Among them, “The Doll” tells of a coven that meets for orgies and for placing curses on a devil doll that attracts the devil himself into the orgy, a huge figure with curling horns and a monstrous penis. So the curses work—but is this really the devil? Campbell’s urge for variety has him feature different pervy modes in each of the new tales as well. In the rather dreary and fogbound “The Limits of Fantasy,” a dirty-picture photographer for a men’s spanker magazine sneaks pictures through the frosted glass of her bathroom window of a beautiful blond neighbor and then finds that his spanky fantasies about the pictures have painful real-life effects. No power of fantasy can force glowing interest into that sow’s ear from Monogram Pictures. In “The Body in the Window,” a British councilman tours the Amsterdam red-light district and sex shops, looking for the worst he can find, to report to the council, and to his wife, to justify his trip. This turns out to be a bony girl his daughter’s age, manacled naked to a wheel. When he tries to free her with pliers, she seduces him on the turning wheel and he finds that—well, a surprise. The most charming of Campbell’s cryptic kisses is “Kill Me Hideously,” about horrorwriter Willy Bantam. He’s begged repeatedly by a nutcase—who loves his goriest books—to put her in his next book. So he does—but she’s a terrible mess before he’s through.
Spank you very much, Ramsey.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-765-30004-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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